January 4, 2018

By Charles Stewart III for The Washington Post

On Wednesday, President Trump announced that he had terminated his Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. This has raised a variety of important questions about the commission’s work and what comes next. Here’s what you need to know.

What was the commission and why was it controversial?

The commission was appointed in May 2017 after Trump had made unsubstantiated claims that 3 million to 5 million people had fraudulently voted in the 2016 election. The commission was chaired by Vice President Pence, with Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach as vice chair.

Its formal charge was to investigate ways to improve confidence in the electoral system and to investigate “those vulnerabilities in voting systems and practices used for Federal elections that could lead to improper voter registrations and improper voting, including fraudulent voter registrations and fraudulent voting.”

The commission’s first formal act was to request the states to send it their voter registration lists, including personal information such as Social Security numbers. This request was met with bipartisan opposition. Although some states did send some information, no state fully complied with the request; most states replied as they would have replied to any public request for voter registration lists. The request for the voter file lists, along with the secrecy that surrounded committee decision-making, led to a number of lawsuits.

Why disband the commission?

The White House cited the failure of the states to comply with data requests and ongoing lawsuits as the reason for disbanding the committee.

But more generally, the commission had become an issue for those who wished to aggressively pursue charges of voting fraud. Despite the high-minded charge given to the commission, it was clear all along that it had a narrower mission: vigorously pursue the claim that there were millions of double-voters and noncitizen voters in the 2016 election.

Related Articles

Millions of Black Voters Are Being Purged From Voter Rolls, Often Illegally: Report

August 1, 2018

By Michael Harriot for The Root As the end of Barack Obama’s presidency grew closer, election officials began preparing for the next election. Instead of strengthening the security of voting machines and making voting more accessible to citizens, states did the exact opposite. But they didn’t just make it harder to vote. For hundreds of…

Here’s How Trump Is Rigging Democracy at the Voting Booth

April 24, 2018

Go to MotherJones for more info: Today we’re launching a new Mother Jones video series explaining everything you need to know about efforts to undermine voting in America. We’ve covered this territory for years. In 2012, Kevin Drum detailed the GOP’s 10-year campaign to gin up voter fraud hysteria in an attempt to bring back…

Georgia GOP pushes elimination of Sunday voting to suppress black turnout. The proposal would also shorten voting hours in Atlanta.

March 20, 2018

By Kira Lerner for ThinkProgress Georgia Republicans are advancing a bill through the state legislature that would suppress African-American turnout by eliminating Sunday voting and cutting the hours that polls are open in Atlanta. The bill, SB 363, would force polls in the majority African American city of Atlanta to close an hour earlier —…